Schoenberg: Why He Matters, by Harvey Sachs

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Schoenberg: Why He Matters by Harvey Sachs

Arnold Schoenberg was difficult from the start. As a young composer in early 20th century Vienna, he wrote in a style comparable to Mahler or Strauss, yet more frenetic, more restless. But there was a period in American “serious music”—following Schoenberg’s death in 1951—when his academic acolytes made a cult of difficulty. They declared that Schoenberg’s atonal or twelve-tone system represented the apex of musical evolution. Any composer interested in melody—or even having fun—was a dead-ender, a deviationist. 

Music historian Harvey Sachs has written a lucid appreciation of the composer in Schoenberg: Why He Matters. The “Why He Matters” is a subhead only a PR director could love and is largely irrelevant in context. Schoenberg “matters” if only one person cares enough for his music to listen. Perhaps that subhead conveys Sachs’ anxiety that post-1980, it would be hard to find even one composer or conductor who advocates for Schoenberg. Sachs cites statistics showing that his work is rarely performed in recent years by the world’s major orchestras.

Writing for non-specialists, Sachs keeps the conservatory jargon to a minimum, focusing instead on the arc of Schoenberg’s life and music. The composer was raised in cultural ferment. The Vienna of his youth was the mecca of modernism; it was also the Petri dish for virulent antisemitism (Schoenberg was Jewish). 

Despite the rising tide of hatred, Schoenberg was fully assimilated into Austro-German culture. When World War I broke out, Schoenberg “was a rabid supporter of Teutonic supremacy,” in Sachs’ words, denouncing Stravinsky and Ravel as “mediocre kitschmongers.” Schoenberg’s perspective evolved with the changing world situation (albeit he never cared for Stravinsky). After Hitler came to power, he realized that his life in Germanic Europe was over and found sanctuary in California. In 1951 he was elected honorary president of the Israel Academy of Music. By that time, he was too ill to travel to the Holy Land.

Schoenberg reached the height of respect at a time when the intelligentsia sought and embraced groundbreaking work whether they understood it or not—think James Joyce or Jackson Pollock. But musical appreciation is tied to performance, and many classical musicians, Sachs’ notes, find learning Schoenberg’s music difficult, time devouring and ultimately unsatisfying. As for the concertgoing public, Schoenberg’s “sound language has alienated and continues to alienate the majority of listeners” for being “foreign to their senses; they can’t decipher the emotional content.”

Even Sachs is forced to confess that “on days during which I had spent many hours with Schoenberg’s music I often needed to listen to some Mozart in the evening, as a sort of head-clearing operation.” And yet, Schoenberg’s audacity remains admirable, and if his music recedes into obscurity, one reason is its demand for close attention in a distracted world of diminishing attention spans.

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